Alke Schmidt BILL'S STORY … a tale of weapons of mass destruction, war crimes, and a government suppressing critical journalism …. from the mid-20th century In 1945, John William (‘Bill’) Powell, a young journalist from Missouri, took over from his father as editor of the Shanghai-based ‘China Weekly Review’. In the years that followed, he covered the momentous events that took place in the region, most importantly the Chinese Revolution and the Korean war. In doing so, he was not afraid to deviate from the US government line. For example, his paper reported widespread Chinese accusations that the US was waging germ warfare in Korea. Because of these writings, Bill and his wife Sylvia became victims of McCarthy’s communist witchhunt when they returned to the US in 1953 with their two young children. They were tried for sedition and subsequently for treason, punishable with the death penalty. The journalists became front page news. The trial finally collapsed in 1961, but it took eight years out of their lives and ruined them financially. Bill always knew that there was something to the story that had so upset the US administration, and he also suspected that the US had benefited from Japanese know-how gained through human germ warfare experiments during WWII. Years later, Bill used the Freedom of Information Act to plough, painstakingly, through piles of newly-declassified documents in search of evidence. In 1981, after four years of research, he had clearly established that indeed the Japanese had, during WW II, systematically used human guinea pigs – mostly prisoners of war - to test biological weapons. He also found that the US had covered up this atrocity in order to be able to access the results of these human experiments. General Ishii Shiro, the notorious mastermind of the infamous ‘Unit 731’ germ warfare research unit, was never tried before the Tokyo War Tribunal. And whilst Bill did not find a document that specifically admitted the use of germ warfare by the US in Korea, he did unearth facts which suggested that this was true. When he published his findings, the newspaper man once again became the news – a vindication of sorts. Despite this notoriety, Bill has always been a very private person, and he does not consider himself a hero. However, he has always been committed to report news truthfully, even if this irked the powers that be. And he stood by his story in the face of the most extraordinary threats and intimidation. You could say that this is just what journalists are supposed to do. But in George W Bush’s America, such journalists are an endangered species (although the New Orleans disaster might just have changed that). When I asked Bill last year if he thought that things were worse in the US now than they were under McCarthy, he said: “I think it is worse now. At least, I had a fair trial”. The people locked up in Guantánamo Bay and other US ‘detention centres’ around the world are not so lucky. - September 2005 - Bill Powell died on 15 December 2008, aged 89. Sadly, he did not live to see the first few days of Barack Obama’s presidency, when Obama signed executive orders on transparency and openness in government, on shutting down Guantanamo Bay and secret CIA detention centres, and on banning the use of coercive interrogation techniques. Bill would have appreciated. - January 2009 - New York Times Obituary San Francisco Chronicle Obituary Back to portfolio